Your Attention, Please . . .

Jessica Hahn Can`t Get Enough Of It

August 07, 1988|By Jon Anderson.

Looking remarkably fresh for a person who has been bombed and strafed by the media for the last 18 months, Jessica Hahn swept into an office in the Playboy Building last week, flashing $12,000 worth of personal reconstructive surgery.

What had hurt the most? an interviewer asked. ``My nose,`` she said.

``I also had my teeth and breasts done,`` she explained, settling her deeply unzipped black dress onto a beige sofa and shaking an immense amount of hair, ``but the nose was really annoying. All the bandages. Not being able to breathe.

``But now I am so grateful. It`s made a difference.``

A difference? ``I`m really happy for a change,`` she said, speaking not only of physical changes but mental growth that has included the chance to tell her side of a messy story. ``I`m not angry,`` she began. ``I feel better. Don`t use this-it sounds like a cliche-but I`m not afraid anymore. I`m grateful.

``This was my therapy. I am, you know, free now. I`m not afraid of people anymore. That was my biggest problem. I felt if I disappointed somebody, they were going to just cast me away. I needed to be wanted, and that`s how you get yourself in trouble.

``People say, `Jessica, aren`t you craving attention?` Well, I think everybody in this world would die without attention. It`s like water to a plant,`` she said, pointing to a fern in the corner of the room.

``Don`t you mean affection?`` the interviewer asked. Hahn paused, appeared confused, then started to argue. ``Affection? Attention?`` she said. ``It`s the same thing, isn`t it? You want to be noticed.``

Hahn certainly has been noticed in the eight years since, as a secretary for the Full Gospel Pentecostal Church in the working-class town of Massapequa in Long Island, N.Y., she accepted an invitation on Dec. 4, 1980, from faith healer John Wesley Fletcher to fly down to Tampa to meet his friend-her idol- evangelist Jim Bakker.

Running through her story once again, Hahn said she drank a glass of drugged wine in a motel room in nearby Clearwater. She wound up in bed with Bakker and later with Fletcher, who pulled all the blankets onto his side of the bed after they made love, fell asleep and left her freezing.

It was an ungentlemanly oversight for Fletcher and a very expensive one for Bakker. His television ministry, known as PTL, foundered after Hahn made their affair public in March, 1987. Three months later, PTL filed for bankruptcy reorganization with $130 million in debts.

``You mean,`` the interviewer asked, ``that, at the end of all you went through, if John Wesley Fletcher had given you one blanket, none of this would have happened? The PTL empire would still be going? Jim and Tammy Bakker would still be in control?``

Hahn paused.

``Yes,`` she said. ``If they`d done just one little thing to show I was human, I probably would have kept quiet.``

As historians note, remembering England`s King Richard III, empires have fallen over details, such as the lack of a horse at a crucial moment in war. Hahn`s decision to enter into battle began five years ago. In 1983, she confided the details of the encounter to her pastor, Rev. Gene Profeta. He called in a friend, Paul Roper, a self-styled Christian vigilante from Anaheim, Calif., to help Hahn defend herself against worried PTL staffers who were pressing her to sign a document denying that any incident took place.

Roper was no stranger to theological frays. Several months before he met Hahn, he had taken on Rev. Ralph Wilkerson, colorful founder of Anaheim`s 10,000-member Melodyland Christian Center, accusing him of misspending church funds for personal purposes. Roper took control of Melodyland`s finances himself, dumped Wilkerson, sold off the church`s two planes, slashed salaries, dismantled its television ministry and, in the words of one admirer, ``turned the place around in six months.``

``I never could figure out what Paul Roper did,`` Hahn said. ``He told me at various times that he was an accountant, a minister and a lawyer.`` He also knew how to operate a tape recorder. After taping Hahn in a 1983 session in which she described her motel encounter with the two evangelists, he negotiated a hush-money settlement two years later with PTL for $265,000, gave Hahn $20,000 of the first payment of $115,000 and kept $95,000. When the story eventually broke in 1987, he released a transcript to newspapers. (Roper, through a representative in his Anaheim office, declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Though many people, in similar situations, might have gone to a therapist, worked through their emotions in private and tried to rebuild their lives, Hahn, now 29, is happy she went public. ``I was quiet for seven years,`` she said. ``It was either, `Jessica, say nothing` and let other people tell `The Jessica Hahn Story,` or tell it myself.``